Stella continues to think about sandwiches…
After offering Mark a playdough sandwich on a red felt plate, Stella then presses her hand firmly into another piece of playdough making a hand print, and offers this to Mark, saying: There’s a hand in your sandwich. Then she draws a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
A couple of days later Stella is still thinking about sandwiches – musical sandwiches, apparently!
Lila is thinking about sandwiches, too.
She makes pink and blue sandwiches with felt, showing how she folds the felt just so.
All the children have greatly enjoyed making open-faced jam sandwiches on cocktail bread at snack. We’ve done this once a week for the last couple of weeks. They choose between strawberry, grape and raspberry jam, and spread the jam with little butter knives.
But the playdough, once a source of sandwiches, now mostly assumes other roles – even after teachers offer squares and wooden “knives” (might children mold playdough squares and cut them into “sandwich triangles?” Not at this time!) So we switch out the squares for semi-circles, and this elicits new investigations, many of which involve stacking, height, and balancing. Seeing this, we notice that creating structures with height has been an interest in many areas of the classroom. We offer stackable cylinders as well.
But back to the playdough. On Thursday, Kesler announces he’s making a diving board and gets to work. When the diving board (wooden “knife”) doesn’t immediately suspend itself in the air when stuck into a blob of playdough, he adds playdough to the other end to hold it up, explaining that it’s the water. Johann hears this and tries it, too. Chris looks at Johann’s structure and comments that it looks like a bridge (another topic that keeps popping up).
Josie decides that she wants to make a diving board, too. At first she’s frustrated when, as happened initially with Kesler, her diving board won’t suspend in the air. Then she notices Kesler’s “water,” and adopts this strategy. But while Johann lengthened his structure by adding on to his “bridge,” (he acknowledges that it is a bridge, perhaps inspired by Chris’ statement), Josie lengthens hers using the semicircles.
But there’s more! Kesler pushes a knife across a piece of flattened playdough – it’s an airplane! Johann likes this idea, too, and makes an airplane with three wings.
From here, they part ways as far as exchanging ideas. Kesler notes that he can make a circle out of the semicircles while Johann uses playdough to glue two knives together.
